VSI 243. A great survey of the native people of North America. While not native, I live in AZ and adore the unique perspective of native writers and sVSI 243. A great survey of the native people of North America. While not native, I live in AZ and adore the unique perspective of native writers and stories. The authors of this book Theda Perdue and Michael D Green (both professors of history at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)k, while not Native themselves, do a good job of surveying the history and diversity of the native people of North America. Their survey doesn't have enough room to explore very deep on any one topic, but they incorporate a lot in a short book. ...more
I had four roommates (and friends) my senior year in college. The other three all took an honors course that required them to read Ellul's Propaganda I had four roommates (and friends) my senior year in college. The other three all took an honors course that required them to read Ellul's Propaganda and the Technological Society. Not wanting to be left out of our late night conversations, I bought and read the books. They felt prescient 24 years ago. Now, after FB, Twitter, TikTok, FoxNews, MSNBC, etc., it feels that Ellul really stuck the landing. If anything he may have underestimated the scale of communications (phones and social media) that would dominate our 21st century. We have been encircled by technology, technique, and propaganda. I would love to have seen his take on AI and social media....more
I read this about 27 years ago in college. Reading it again. Amazing at how relevant this is to the Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, FoxNews worlI read this about 27 years ago in college. Reading it again. Amazing at how relevant this is to the Tiktok, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, FoxNews world we live in. I'd love to see him reincarnated to update his thoughts about social media. I think I have a pretty good idea of the things he would focus on isolation, group propaganda, anxiety, inability for Churches to keep up. He would probably be able to write a whole damn book on it. Who knows? Maybe someone has already done the work....more
If I examine this book without considering the author's life, it becomes a different review. If I examine this book in the context of the author's deaIf I examine this book without considering the author's life, it becomes a different review. If I examine this book in the context of the author's death it explains certain things and also complicates my eventual review of it. I like it, mostly. But clearly, this wasn't an abstract philosophy or ideology for Mishima. The book didn't end with the last four lines of the poem Icarus at the end of the essay/memoir:
"For wanting to fly off to the unknown Or the known: Both of them a single, blue speck of an idea?"
No. In man ways this book theme, ideas, ideology ended on 25 November 1970 when Mishima committed seppuku after a failed nationalist coup. The final act. The final sad, red period/speck/stain on his philosophy....more
When I was growing up in Utah as a bookish kid, I used to make the comment that Mormons couldn't write good literature (for the most part still true*)When I was growing up in Utah as a bookish kid, I used to make the comment that Mormons couldn't write good literature (for the most part still true*) because they aren't comfortable writing about, living in the shadows and the dark. Great art needs shadows and light. Not every piece of art needs to be a Dutch Masters, but in literature one needs to be able to deal with the whole man, the ambiguities of morality and human experience. Tanizaki takes the spirit of this youthful thought of mine and delves into the Japanese aesthetic of darkness and shadows. It really is a nice, small book. Elegant and to the point. The only reason I gave this 4 stars instead of 5 was I wanted more. Like a delicious and expensive meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant, I found the meal delicious and the portion frustratingly small.
* the exceptions are usually the ones who have either left (Evenson), exist on the fringe (Udall), or are comfortable in dealing with the ambiguities of the human experience (Peck)....more
The longer I sat with this the better I liked it. I prefer his fiction to his political writings. That said I’ve read less interesting, less compellinThe longer I sat with this the better I liked it. I prefer his fiction to his political writings. That said I’ve read less interesting, less compelling, insider writing coming from some libertarians, open-market capitalists, Mormons, Buddhists and Christians. It is impossible to be neutral, so Miéville, doesn’t even pretend to. Liked it better than his book on the October Revolution.
(Later thoughts: Miéville does a good job in pointing out some of Marx/Engels blind spots- feminism/nationalism/globalism/imperialism/race)....more
This is part of my holy trinity now of nature writing. It is right up there with Baker's The Peregrine and Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. Brilliant aThis is part of my holy trinity now of nature writing. It is right up there with Baker's The Peregrine and Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard. Brilliant an beautiful. I'm going to jump off because I'll just continue to mumble things like: scripture, masterpiece, and prose poetry, and y'all won't take me serious. ...more
Goddam I love Zadie Smith. These short essays were all written shortly after the Pandemic in 2020. Zadie was living in New York, teaching at NYU I belGoddam I love Zadie Smith. These short essays were all written shortly after the Pandemic in 2020. Zadie was living in New York, teaching at NYU I believe, and these snapshots and vignettes evoke her experience and her thoughts about isolation, family, writing, America, racism, healthcare, etc. The thing I love about Zadie is her prose seems effortless. It is like watching a world-class ice skater warm up by executing impossible turns. She is my generation, but different enough (gender, nationality, skin color) that I seem to understand the shared spaces we have, but also through her writing, I am confronted with my blindspots and my comfort. She is a global treasure and one of those handful of writers who once you read one book, you buy all of them so you can experience the whole range of what she is as a writer and a person....more
“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to“Whiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable. Or so our writers seem to say.” ― Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
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This book is essentially three lectures Toni Morrison gave at Harvard University (the William E Massey Sr. Lectures) on how race, the black body, and the presence and even absence (hint: there is no REAL absence) have impacted American literature. The essays begin by exploring how this "black presence" is central to any understanding of our national literature.
"These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature--individualism, masculinity, social engagement vs historical isolation,; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist* presence."
Our literature does this through codes and restrictions, contradictions, conflicts, so that even when a real Africanist presence is found in certain works of American fiction, it is used to prop up the idea of whiteness.
Morrison busts out some Hegelian synthesis, suggesting that replacing one hierarchy of literary criticism (Thesis::Eurocentric) with another (Antithesis::African-American Criticism) still leaves a lot of literary rooms unexplored. She isn't just interested in how America's primary conflict not only impacted the victim/the objects of racist policy and attitudes (and what kinda impact racism had on those who perpetrated), she is proposing examining "the impact of notions of racial hierarchy, racial exclusion, and racial vulnerability and availability on nonblack [writers] who held, resisted, explored, or altered those notions."
In these essays/lectures she explores Willa Cather, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, & Ernest Hemingway.
I read this short book today. It took me only a few hours, but it really made me miss Toni Morrison. I can't imagine her response to the moral panic CRT has caused among a large segment of the American Experiment. A lot of what she wrote seemed both more hopeful than our current course anticipates, but also quite prophetic of the power that the blackness has achieved in helping white writers (and certainly politicians) to write their fiction, both good and bad.
* Morrison has her own working definition for these essays regarding Africanist. For her Africanist is an easy short-hand for American culture's understanding of the dark other, not only for the "not-free" but also the "not-me." A figure that haunts not just our history and our politics but our stories, our myths, and our understanding of ourselves....more
I enjoyed it. Looking at the rise of Homo Sapiens and the decline and eventual extinction of Homo neanderthalensis through the prism ecology and theorI enjoyed it. Looking at the rise of Homo Sapiens and the decline and eventual extinction of Homo neanderthalensis through the prism ecology and theories of invasive theories. The subtitle of the book: "How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction" does seem to be a bit of a stretch. Her theory definitely suggests that early domesticated dogs/wolves might have aided Homo Sapien (Modern Man) in dominating the apex guild of carnivores in Europe.
The book is also a bit more broad, because dominating that position, man with pup's help might have also been part of the eventual extinction of other large carnivores (Cave Bear, etc) and large mammals (mammoths). The book, however, is a bit more nuanced, recognizing that climate change also probably had pushed neanderthalensis near extinction, and the introduction of man to Europe might have been the final spear in the side of the Neanderthal.
I enjoyed the book and it systematically covered a lot of territory and synthesized a lot of literature surrounding this period. The writing was ok, just didn't blow me away. So, I enjoyed it, but it didn't exactly blow me away. ...more
"And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience." - Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
"If children abandon 'the s"And our children's vanishing encounters with nature represent a loss of primary experience." - Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
"If children abandon 'the sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands', if 'children are not permitted...to be adventurers and explorers as children', then 'what will become of the world of adventure, stories, of literature itself?'" - Michael Chabon, The Wilderness of Childhood
"I was reminded, too, of Emerson's beautiful description of language as 'a city to the building of which every person has brought a stone.'" - Emerson, quoted by Robert MacFarlane, Landmarks
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Inspired by the removal of several nature words in the Oxford Junior Dictionary: "acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup..." The list was tragic. The thesis of Robert Macfarlane's book is we love the things we name, and if we lose the name for things in our language, our ability to care for nature and wilderness diminished. This book is a signpost pointing to books where the language of nature is strong. Chapters are essentially essays where Robert Macfarlane is able to sing a love letter to fantastic books like Nan Shepherd's In the Cairngorms, Roger Deakon's Waterlog: A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain, J.A. Baker's The Peregrine, Richard Skelton's Landings, Barry Lopez's Arctic Dreams, Richard Jefferies' Nature Near London, Clarince Ellis's The Pebbles On The Beach, and John Muir's My First Summer in the Sierra.
Macfarlane's love for these books and topics is so rich it is hard to not love them back. I finished this book and purchased three more. It was infective. Just like the glossaries that divide the chapters. In the glossary, Macfarlane include nature words in danger of being lost. The words mostly are focused on Great Britain, but when this book was first published it inspired readers to send in their own local lexicons of nature. It really is beautifully constructed and for a book organic, which structurally is nearly perfect....more
Principles do not constrain creativity: rather they inspire diverse and imaginative echoes of seeds, vines, leaves, flowers and fruit. A designer who Principles do not constrain creativity: rather they inspire diverse and imaginative echoes of seeds, vines, leaves, flowers and fruit. A designer who works with repetition, alternation, undulation, tessellation, spirals, and symmetry soon discovers the rich variety made possible by working with these simple generative processes. - Lisa DeLong, Curves
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There is a space where geometry, math, art all meet. Lisa DeLong rules that universe (S( or at least one or two of the major curves of that universe )S).
I love mosaics, Islamic art, geometry, math, and literature. So I'm glad I discovered Lisa's art a few years back, and equally glad I discovered this little book. It describes, technically, the Curves used in decorative arts, but like the Yin Yang and the Tree of Life, this type of art expands up to the universe and drives down to electrons spinning.
God, I imagine, is constantly drawing ellipses with his finger across the arches and domes of a spiraling Universe. And Lisa is here with us to pull out a brass compass and draw them, and describe the whole process....more
"He dared to think and believe what other brave men would have shrunk from contemplating. He He was an adventurer in the intellectual and the spiritua"He dared to think and believe what other brave men would have shrunk from contemplating. He He was an adventurer in the intellectual and the spiritual as well as the physical world and it was this combination of interests, actively followed, which made him unique, one of the rarest personalities ever seen on earth." - Byron Farwell, Burton: A Biography of Sir Richard Francis Burton
While not an academic, it is hard not to think of him as a professional historian. Over a 40 year period he published 14 books, mostly focused on the Victorian period of exploration and war, mostly published by Norton and Viking.
The book isn't a hagiography. Burton had many faults, many short-comings, many quirks and Farwell highlights those as well as his brilliance and bravery. I can't give it my highest ratings for biographies simply because while I adore both Burton and Farwell, this isn't up to the level of Robert A Caro, Edmund Morris, or say David W. Blight. It was really good, just not great. The narrative drive of the book is sidetracked by Burton himself who jumps from place to place, ship to ship, idea to idea.
That said, it is a fantastic start to exploring Burton's character and to gain insight into England during its Victorian period in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. Points should also be given to not ignoring Burton's wife and her role in Burton's life....more
Whenever there is a disaster of epic proportions, something so grand it adjusts the way we look at the world (think Greeks and volcanos, other civilizWhenever there is a disaster of epic proportions, something so grand it adjusts the way we look at the world (think Greeks and volcanos, other civilizations with fires, floods, famines) a myth often gets created to explain it. Gods were made. Stories were told. We need to make sense of the world and grand myths give us structure.
The 20th century, with its world wars and the emergence of quantum mechanics and the atomic age, created a huge disruption. The gods that came out of the 20th century were mathematicians and physicists (at least for a while) and we developed myths about them. Certainly, they were real men, with real passions; real flesh and blood, but they were our rock stars, our saviors, a ultimately, perhaps, our destroyers.
The use of fiction mingled with nonfiction isn't new. We have seen it several times with Norman Mailer, Hilary Mantel, Truman Capote, etc. We see it all the time with movies (Based on a true story). But often, when we mix fiction and nonfiction, it causes some heartburn in those who crave certainty. The problem is we live in an age of uncertainty. We have deconstructed the atom and history. Even those histories that seem rigorous and scholarly, can also be perceived as works of fiction. Just like an electron can take an infinite number of paths between two points, so too can a historian when writing about a grand figure of history. Gaps are filled. Assumptions are made. Things are included and excluded. The record is only so available. The reader either fills in what she wants or the author, in sketching a line between points ,makes an assumption about a path.
What Labatut has done here is explicitly been creative in those gaps. He's ventured into an almost mythic and surreal darkness and come out with a story that seems born as much as written. These stories weave a fabric together with fact and fiction and the pattern is dark, but also illuminates....more
"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again." - John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
[image]"It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again." - John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez
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This book was originally the idea of Steinbeck and his marine biologist/muse Ed Ricketts. They traveled from Monterey, CA down to Baja and collected flora and fauna throughout the Sea of Cortez (see Gulf of California). This is right before WWII started for the US and about 1.5 years before Japan pulled us into it, but the impending war is like a giant submerged whale that follows the Western Flyer down to Mexico and back.
It is told mostly in a first person, plural, supposedly the joint thoughts of Steinbeck and Ricketts, but mostly a narrative constructed by Steinbeck after reviewing his log/diary from the trip. The original book, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research included the research and accounting of Ed Ricketts of all the items they collected. After Ed Ricketts died, his name was dropped as was the species catalogue. Steinbeck added a Eulogy for his dead friend, but the estate keep Rickett's name from the authorship.
I read this book as I drank Pain Killers and Margaritas in Puerto Penasco (Rocky Point), Mexico while recovering for a week after breaking a femur in May. It seemed an appropriate time to carefully place a toe back in the warm pool of Steinbeck's writing.
"With the same ulterior motive*, I could undertake to describe in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned a"With the same ulterior motive*, I could undertake to describe in capsule form the many writing projects that I have conceived and seriously planned across the years but have never written." - John McPhee, "Thorton Wilder at the Century," Tabula Rasa (Volume 1?)
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* When McPhee was young he went to a lunch with Thorton Wilder, when asked "Wilder said he was not actually writing a new play or novel but was fully engaged in a related project. He was cataloguing the plays of Lope de Vega. Lope de Vega wrote some eighteen hundred full-length plays. Four hundred and thirty-one survive. How long would it take to read four hundred and thirty-one plays? How long would it take to summarize each in descriptive detail and fulfill the additional requirements of cataloguing?"
***
Now in his early 90s, McPhee better understands: "I know that those four hundred and thirty-one plays were serving to extend Thornton Wilder’s life."
That is the purpose of this book. McPhee is, at the bidding of his wife, his daughter, or the inevitable tug of the eternities, going through his files: organizing, reminiscing, looking for gems, remembering adventures, friends. Bringing to light the hidden, the unpublished, the errata and errant pages and proposals.
He has been periodically adding these to the New Yorker: drip, drip, drip.
Tabula Rasa appeared 3 times from Jan 2020 to Feb 2022.
"Tabula Rasa: Vol 1" appeared in the New Yorker on Jan 12, 2020, and included the vignettes: 1. Trujillo 2. Thorton Wilder at the Century 3. The Moons of Methuselah 4. "Hitler Youth" 5. The Bridges of Christian Menn 6. The Airplane that Crashed in the Woods 7. On the Campus 8. The Guilt of the US Male 9. Extremadura
"Tabula Rasa: Vol 2" appeared in the New Yorker on Apr 19, 2021, and included the vignettes: 1. Sloop to Gibraltar 2. The Valley 3. December 19,1943 4. The Dutch Ship Tyger 5. Ray Brock 6. Writer
"Tabula Rasa: Vol 3" appeared in the New Yorker on Feb 7, 2022, and included the vignettes: 1. Not that One 2. Night Watchman 3. George Recker and Dr. Dick 4. Dinners with Henry Luce 5. Bourbon and Bing Cherries 6. Dropped Antaeus
These 21 small pieces represent a little less than 1/2: 21/50. Clearly, if you like what you read in the New Yorker, you still need to buy the book. Fair. I would hyperlink to the New Yorker articles, but unfortunately, Goodreads only allows one to link to things from inside goodreads.com. Booo!
McPhee might be my favorite nonfiction writer, but while these pieces do present an interesting structure and allow the reader to get a bigger sense of a big writer, they are also cast-offs. Some parts are amazing, others are filler, and the structure seems more like a Smörgåsbord of memories, people, reflections, and almost taken paths. I enjoyed it, but these 50 pieces can't compete with McPhee's great books. This is Michael Jordan at 60 not the GOAT at 20-30....more
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